His Own Good Sword (The Cymeriad #1)
Page 24
Tyren made no move to take it. Morlyn waited a while. Then he crouched down and took Tyren’s chin between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, pushed Tyren’s head back and put the skin to his lips and forced the water down that way. Tyren choked on it, gasping and coughing, but he got enough of it down, finally, for Morlyn’s satisfaction, and Morlyn tied up the skin again and sat back on his heels.
“Can’t have you dying yet, Risto,” he said, amiably.
They rested perhaps a quarter hour and then they went on again, due west now, weaving through the pine trees. They went west a long time. He didn’t pay much attention to where they were going, after a while—didn’t put the effort into keeping his head up, his eyes open. He was aware, eventually, that the ground was sloping steeply up beneath the colt’s hooves, that they were climbing a sheer-sided hill. Ahead of them now were broken stone steps leading up through the pine to the crest.
Bryn stopped the colt before the steps. “You walk from here, Vareno,” he said.
Tyren dismounted. He wavered on his feet when he’d gotten to the ground and Bryn reached, from instinct, to take his left arm and steady him.
“I tell you we shouldn’t have come back here,” Bryn said to Morlyn, when Morlyn had come up to them—the continuation of some earlier argument, it seemed. “They’ll be coming to this place, surely.”
“We’ll have fair enough warning if they do,” said Morlyn.
“No, we should start back south. The others have probably done it already. Foolish to stay here with so many Vareni crawling about. Deal with this—” Bryn’s fingers tightened round Tyren’s elbow, “—and let’s go back south.”
“This was the arranged place,” said Morlyn, easily. “See to the horse, Bryn, and give me some peace a while.”
Bryn hesitated. He seemed ready to argue it; his shoulders had stiffened and he’d stuck his chin out again. But he let go Tyren’s arm without another word and turned to lead the colt away.
Morlyn came over and unsheathed the flint knife from his belt. He took Tyren’s wrists in his left hand and cut the bow-string from them. Then he nodded towards the steps. They climbed, Tyren going first, Morlyn coming behind him. Tyren went haltingly because of the knee. He stumbled now and then and each time Morlyn put out a quick hand to hold him up, keep him going forward.
There was an ancient stone ruin crowning the very top of the hill. An old beacon tower—Vareno-built, judging by its sculpted white-marble columns. The domed roof of the beacon room itself had fallen away long ago and the thing lay open to the sky now, though the old flag-stone living quarters adjoining it was still roofed and in decent repair.
“Give me the truth of it, Risto,” Morlyn said again, as they came up the last of the steps into the beacon room. “Tell me why you were running.”
Anger was coursing through him hotly as the pain by now. He spoke through gritted teeth. “Does it matter to you? Rien wants the same thing as you in the end. What more do you need to know?”
“I’m wondering what you did to fall so quickly from their favor. Surely this isn’t how the Empire rewards you for your glorious victory at Souvin?”
Tyren said nothing. Morlyn shrugged.
“No matter,” he said. “You can explain the thing to Lord Magryn when he comes, if you don’t wish to explain it to me.”
Tyren looked into Morlyn’s face at that, startled. “Magryn. Magryn’s here?”
“He’ll be here,” said Morlyn, “and he’ll decide what’s to be done with you. For now you can sit down, and I’ll take another look at that wound.”
He went down into the flag-stone hut with the packs. Tyren slid down slowly against one of the ruined columns, leaned his head back and closed his eyes, swallowing to loosen the hard knot of bitterness in his throat. So this was how it would end. Better to have died in Choiro than here, like this, after all: at least in Choiro his death might have accomplished something. Maybe it was just politics, as Aino had said, but at least in Choiro he might have died and felt it meant something. Here it was nothing. Vengeance for the Magryn brat and his ragged band of rebels, that was it.
He heard Morlyn coming back and he opened his eyes to see the Cesino crouching down beside him with a water-skin and fresh bandages and a new-prepared poultice in his hands. Morlyn rinsed the wound and applied the poultice and bound it up firmly, working with the speed and skill of long practice. When he was done he looked up to Tyren’s face.
“It would be nothing at all, if you’d get the chance to rest it fully. Still, as it is—if the poultice is kept fresh, if we keep the fever down—it’ll heal up readily enough.”
“Should I thank you for that?” said Tyren, tightly.
Morlyn smiled. “You’ve no cause to be wishing for death, Lord Risto,” he said.
Bryn came back in a little while. He spoke to Morlyn, who was sitting across from Tyren now with his cavalry sword unsheathed across his lap, polishing the blade with a woolen cloth.
“The Vareni?” he said.
“No sign,” said Morlyn, without looking up. “Still stumbling around northward somewhere, most likely.”
“The others aren’t back yet?”
“Not yet.”
Bryn said, “They should have been back by now if they didn’t go south already.”
“Peace, Bryn,” said Morlyn, with patience.
“It’s dark in an hour.”
“I’ll be worried in the morning, maybe,” said Morlyn. “Not now. Theirs was the longer venture, and there are Vareni to mind, as you’ve noted.”
Bryn sat down a little way from Tyren and unbuckled his own sword from his shoulder. The shadows lengthened into dusk round them. They lit no fire but Morlyn brought out barley cake from the hut, with the last of the wine from Tyren’s pack, and they ate. Tyren didn’t refuse it now. There was no point in refusing; Morlyn was keeping a watchful, ready eye on him. It grew cold after the meal. The air had dried since yesterday’s rain. It was crisp and cool now and there was a sharp wind cutting north-and-south through the columns. The time went very slowly. Even Morlyn seemed anxious when the darkness had settled. He hadn’t sheathed his sword. It lay ready across his knees, and his fingers were drumming a loose rhythm upon the molded bone grip.
There was no movement beyond the crumbling circle of the beacon room until the early hours of the morning. Then there was the whisper of hurried footsteps on stone, and both Bryn and Morlyn sprang up, swords in hand. But the newcomers, coming up from the darkness of the steps, didn’t seem to be strangers. They met Morlyn’s challenge calmly, in hushed Cesino, and then talk ran quickly among all of them—snatches of explanation, a hoarse, exhausted laugh. Tyren picked out Morlyn’s voice from the head of the steps, and a new voice answering: “No, we’ll finish the night here, move in the morning.”
* * *
He hadn’t thought he’d sleep, but he came awake in the morning to the jangle of sword-belts and of packs being buckled, the murmur of voices. He was slumped down against the base of the column, his chin turned onto his left shoulder, and there was a stiffness in his neck from having slept like that. But his head had cleared a little; the fever had left him, and the hot pain from the wound. Morlyn’s poultice had done its work. He sat up, slowly. Bryn and another man were sitting at the head of the steps, bags readied at their feet, their backs to him, watching the forested land to the north while they ate their morning meal. Morlyn was coming out from the hut with a fourth man beside him, and Tyren saw, in a startled glance, this other was Ryn Magryn.
He’d changed since Tyren had seen him last, white-faced in the thick of battle under the gate at the Souvin fort. He looked older now, grimmer—looked tired and thin. His tunic and cloak were worn, ragged, his dark hair in need of a trimming. There were hollow places in his high-boned cheeks from hunger. But it was his eyes had changed the most. They were old eyes now, weathered eyes with an ugly steel hardness in them. They came to rest on Tyren and Tyren wondered absently, as he met the gaze, if there
were the same look in his own eyes. Probably there was. It was the same look he’d seen in Luchian Marro’s face that day in Rien—he remembered, suddenly. He’d thought it was just the weight of command then. But it was a heavier weight than that, a more bitter weight than that: the weight of Souvin for all of them.
Magryn spoke to Morlyn in Cesino without taking his eyes from Tyren.
“Bring him. I’ll deal with him alone. Bryn, Ceryn—get the horses ready, in the meanwhile. We ride out after this.”
He went back into the hut. Morlyn came over to Tyren and clapped strong hands on his shoulders and pulled him up. When he was on his feet Morlyn hastened him firmly over to the doorway of the hut and let him go. Tyren stood in the doorway a moment, his right hand on the jamb. The hut was windowless and he couldn’t immediately distinguish Magryn from among the shadows within. Then he saw Magryn had sat down with his back against the westward wall, was holding a pack across his knees as he tied up the straps.
Magryn spoke in Vareno now. He spoke it carefully, formally, as if he’d let it go unused a while and was only slowly bringing it to mind again.
“You can sit, Lord Risto,” he said.
Tyren went down into the hut and sat stiffly down across from him, cross-legged, his hands clenched into fists between his knees. There was a tightness in the pit of his stomach, dryness crawling up the back of his throat. He looked at Magryn and waited.
“The wound’s giving you much pain?” Magryn said, watching him sit.
“No.”
“Your own people did the thing, Morlyn told me—though he couldn’t tell me why.”
“Maybe because I didn’t tell him why.”
“Have you turned traitor, then, that you must run from Rien?”
“I wasn’t the one who did the betraying,” said Tyren.
Magryn studied him silently a while.
“Certain of my people,” he said, at length, “would expect I order your death.”
“Do it, then,” said Tyren.
“I’d like the truth first. I know some things about you I’d like to better understand—two things in particular.”
“What is it you know of me?”
“That you spared Mægo’s life once, when you’d the opportunity to end it—when you might have saved yourself some hurt if you’d ended it.”
“It was a mistake to do. I paid dearly enough for it.”
“And that you’d friendship with the priest, Muryn,” finished Magryn.
Tyren didn’t immediately reply.
“What of it?” he said, finally—said it harshly, to mask the unsteadiness in his voice.
Magryn looked away from him as though he were searching round the little dark room for words.
“He told me—the day we first attacked the fort—he told me you’d give us justice, if we’d be willing to have it. If we’d be willing to have peace that way. He told me that was what I should want for Souvin, for my people. Even if it came of you, of the Empire—that was what I should want for my people. Mægo wouldn’t listen to him. I regret, now—I regret I didn’t, Lord Risto, because I think he was right. We should have been willing. I should have been willing. But it’s too late for that now.”
Tyren said, sourly, “You’ve found out there’s no justice under the Empire, I take it.”
Magryn looked back to him. “You’ve heard of what’s being done in Souvin?”
“I’ve heard nothing except that Muryn’s dead.”
“The new garrison commander intends to make an example of us—intends no other of the mountain tribes will ever again think to rise up as we did. They’re destroying the crops, burning the homes, salting the fields of all those they suppose are supporters of rebellion, whether they’ve the evidence of it or not. I came north to find grain among the other tribes because what remains of our own crop won’t last us the winter.” Magryn’s mouth tightened. “Those who wish to secure their own safety are betraying others to the garrison without cause, thinking to gain favor that way. If I thought it would end it—I’d give myself up to the Vareni, if I thought that would end it. But I’ve no reason to hope for that.”
Tyren said nothing.
Magryn spoke in a slow, solemn voice, as if the words had been painstakingly chosen and rehearsed.
“I brought this on them, Lord Risto. You were willing to show my people justice, and the absence of it, now, is the consequence of my doing, not yours—my doing and Mægo’s. So I’m not convinced I should kill you.”
Tyren said, “It would gratify your men, at least.”
“Morlyn, for one, asked me to spare your life.”
“Did he so?”
Magryn was silent a moment. “Tell me why you came to the Outland, Lord Risto,” he said.
He’d been determined to keep the thing from Morlyn, to keep it stored up someplace deep and dark inside him for a reason he didn’t even know—that same old stubborn Vareno pride, maybe; or maybe it was the fear he couldn’t explain it sufficiently, or that it wouldn’t be rightly understood. He hadn’t tried putting it all into words yet, even for himself. But all at once there was the desperate need to do it, to explain it to someone before it was lost, to let it all out, and he did so, stumblingly, brokenly, not caring it was almost a babble.
“I’d thought—in Souvin—I’d finally convinced myself I’d fought for something worthy—that the Empire could be something worthy, something great. Muryn had convinced me of it. And they killed him. For no reason. Not that he was dangerous, that he preached uprising against us. Only that they knew I’d try to prevent it, and they could prove my disloyalty if I did. It was something to tarnish the Risto name, to cost us face in Choiro. Politics, nothing more. That was what I spilled blood for at Souvin.”
Magryn said, quietly, “You wanted justice in the Empire’s name, and the Empire has branded you a traitor for it.”
“Because they’ve use for me as a traitor. That’s all that matters. I should have realized it sooner. I wish to God I’d realized it sooner, before I’d blood on my hands for it.”
“Will you not find sanctuary even at home? What of your father? He’s a powerful man.”
He thought of Vessy. He could see the city in his mind: the villa at the top of the hill, and the lake below, and the ships at their mooring stones, and thatch-roofed huts of the fishermen scattered all across the black shore. He thought of the way he’d ridden there from Choiro three months ago, remembered how he’d dreaded that homecoming, dashed it to pieces and then run from it all the way to Souvin, like a fool. If only he’d known, then. If only he could change it now—go back and change all of it, so that Souvin wouldn’t happen, so that Muryn would live, so that Torien wouldn’t be dead in the mud on the road to Rien, or Senna at the hands of the Guard in Choiro. But there was no use in regret.
Aloud, he said, “My father is dead.” The words were as much for himself as for Magryn, the realness of it and the weight of it closing like an iron collar round his heart as he spoke. “They told me in Rien. He’d have tried to appeal for my release, and that would have meant political ruin for the family—the loss of the governorship, at least.” That sudden clarity was painful as a knife-blade twisting in his gut. He’d been a fool to think Torien would ransom him merely for the sake of the Risto name. Far better for the Risto name had Torien left him to the court martial, left him to execution in Choiro, demonstrated his own loyalty by virtue of his silence—Torien would have known that well enough. It wasn’t the name that mattered. It had never been the name that mattered. In that understanding Tyren stumbled over his words, his voice raw, throat aching. “So my brother had him killed. Before he might do such dishonor as to save my life.”
“Your brother holds the governorship, then.”
“Yes.”
Magryn nodded. He moved the pack from his lap so he could stand. He slung it over his right shoulder when he’d gotten to his feet. “So Vessy’s shut to you, and you’ve run to the mountains. What’s your intention now?”
“Are there no others in the Empire willing to help you?”
“There are some in the army who were loyal to my father. But to contact them is to put them at risk—and that’s if they’re willing to help me in the first place.”
“Come south with us, then,” said Magryn.
Tyren looked up to him, quickly.
Magryn said, “Morlyn tells me he can mend that wound for you, and you need to move from this place urgently as we do. There are too many of your people about. Come with us and let Morlyn do his work, at least until the searching’s died down. Make your decision then.”
There was silence between them a little while, broken only by the harsh whistle of wind through the hut’s open doorway and the smatterings of bird song from the pine trees below the hilltop. The refusal had formed at once in his head out of habit, out of pride; pride would have him refuse it even knowing he didn’t stand a chance on his own, with this wound, with pursuit closing round him. But it stuck in his throat when he started to speak. He couldn’t get the words out, and he didn’t know if it were that he was finally and completely broken, lost, or if it were a victory of sorts. He didn’t know anymore. But he pushed the pride away and the words tumbled out freely, almost inadvertently.
“I’ll come,” he said.
The others had already gone from the beacon room when he went with Magryn outside. He followed Magryn down the steps, down from the hilltop into the cover of the trees. After a while they left the steps and turned south to go through the pine forest. Morlyn fell in quietly beside them. If he were surprised at Tyren’s presence he didn’t show it. His face was blank. He spoke to Magryn in Cesino.
“They’ll reach this place in two hours, Lord Magryn, coming from the north.”
“Will it be time enough to cover our tracks?”
“It’ll be time enough, my lord.”
Bryn and the other man, Ceryn, were waiting with the horses at the southward foot of the hill. There were five horses, the colt among them, still with his Guard trappings and Aino’s sword strapped to the saddle. Magryn went ahead to put his pack across the saddle of a tall bay horse. When he was done he took the reins of the bay in his left hand, the colt’s reins in his right. He brought the colt wordlessly over to Tyren. Tyren took the reins from him, ran a hand over the colt’s sleek black neck. A sudden wave of relief washed over him. At least he had the colt—the colt, and the sword, and time enough now to figure out his road.